Venezuela “Votes.” Is There a Lesson Here For Democrats?

An election is going on in Venezuela. In a country where there are no more pets and children join gangs to fight over dumpster refuse, while their parents battle for dead rats to eat for dinner, you would expect the incumbent party to lose a free election. But Nicolas Maduro will no doubt be re-elected, in part because the polls are being boycotted by most of his opponents. So Venezuela’s socialist catastrophe will most likely continue, for now. The Associated Press reports:

Sunday’s election has drawn broad criticism since some of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s most-popular rivals were barred from running, and several more were forced into exile.

There were a lot of other irregularities, too, but barring your rivals from running is a tried-and-true path to a second term.

Here in the U.S, the Democratic Party tried a subtler approach. It hired Fusion GPS to fabricate smears against Donald Trump, and then leaked those smears to news outlets that it controls (i.e., nearly all of them) and used the smears to obtain FISA warrants to spy on the Trump campaign. The Democrats also conveyed the Fusion GPS fantasies to high-ranking office-holders like Harry Reid, who used them to attack candidate Trump. But reporters were squeamish about running with the Fusion GPS story, which few actually believed, and, to the Democrats’ dismay, Trump won the election.

So the Democrats went into overdrive. Shortly before President-Elect Trump’s inauguration, Obama’s CIA and FBI leaders “briefed” Trump on the Fusion GPS dossier, which Trump naturally knew was an absurd pack of lies. No matter: that “intelligence briefing,” leaked to the press, opened the floodgates, and Democratic Party news outlets promptly went public with the contents of the false dossier, in an effort to disable President-Elect Trump’s nascent administration.

At the moment, the Democrats’ relatively subtle approach doesn’t appear to be working very well. Next time, perhaps, they won’t take any chances, and will go full Maduro.